The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times (review)

Hermeticism is one of those tricky subjects whose history requires periodic rewriting. Unfortunately, the difficulty arises not only from the considerable corpus of Hermetic material but also from various scholarly and semi-scholarly controversies that continually confuse matters. In The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus, Florian Ebeling sets out to survey primary sources, along the way correcting or clarifying a number of longstanding historiographical issues.

Ebeling’s slim volume is an excellent introduction to a complex and contested field. Rich with descriptive material, covering a generous chronological and textual range, the book is fascinating for specialists and will provide a firm foundation for newcomers. Ebeling begins in Egypt itself, moves steadily through Greco-Roman, medieval, and early modern texts (which last dominate the book), then continues with a rapid sweep through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a concluding nod to Julius Evola’s and Umberto Eco’s wildly different uses of Hermeticism in the twentieth century. Most of the work consists of summary discussions of exemplary texts and thinkers, with some small contextual setup. As an example, chapter 3, “Renaissance,” begins by framing the texts in terms of tradition or rediscovery. Ebeling then examines Ficino, Pico, and briefly Francesco Patrizi, Annibale Rosselli, and Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples. Next he presents contemporary “alchemo-Paracelsism,” surveying Christoph Balduff, Paracelsus himself, Joachim Tancke, and Benedictus Figulus. Finally, we come to “religious Hermeticism,” encountering Sebastian Franck, Philippe de Mornay, and the Occulta Philosophia attributed to Basilius Valentinus. The balance between coverage and close reading is perhaps indicated by the fact that the whole chapter is thirty-two pages.

In his forward, the distinguished Egyptologist Jan Assmann helpfully pinpoints the most crucial contribution of this volume: Ebeling demonstrates that by the early modern period, there were really two different forms of Hermeticism, and that they rarely overlapped in any clear or consistent fashion. Likely best-known to most Renaissance Quarterly readers is the Hermeticism stemming from Ficino’s translations. But the alchemical Hermeticism that influenced Paracelsus was very much an alternative tradition differing in both intellectual content and foundational texts. Where the Ficinian lineage looked to the Corpus Hermeticum, including both the Greek texts Ficino translated and also the Latin Asclepius, the alchemists traced a genealogy to the Emerald Tablet (Tabula Smaragdina) and a number of so-called “practical” Hermetic texts, minimally intersecting the Corpus Hermeticum. Because modern scholars have rarely recognized that they are dealing with two different traditions — to be fair, most early modern and later occult thinkers have not made the distinction either — there has been sharp disagreement about the nature of Hermeticism as an intellectual movement. Ebeling argues, in essence, that this is because there was no single such movement.

Unfortunately, the book largely omits detailed coverage of historiographical controversies, making it somewhat difficult for the nonspecialist to distinguish new information from stock survey. While this absence keeps the volume accessible, it does weaken its contribution. Ebeling clearly knows his material extraordinarily well, and there are glimpses of a clear analytical voice, but on the whole he backs away from development in favor of coverage. This is rather a pity: the confusions common to the field are only partly overcome by reformulating the basis of study. A strong approach to argumentation would go a long way toward situating Hermeticisms in their several intellectual and cultural contexts. One misses, for example, a careful analysis of how and why the two main strands of early modern Hermeticism did and did not come into contact, given the interest in alchemy displayed by thinkers directly in the lineage of Ficino and Pico. Ultimately the question about Hermeticism is not what it was, or if it was, but rather what difference it made and for whom. Ebeling’s book gives us a new, corrected position from which to start asking such questions, but only...